


Sole Survivor

by Violet_CLM



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-26
Updated: 2011-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:16:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violet_CLM/pseuds/Violet_CLM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Vast Glub left the empress alive. She returns to Alternia to try to restore her species and figure out what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sole Survivor

Your name is KIMINOA MAHLIKA and you are EMPRESS of the Troll species. You have developed such an AIR OF AUTHORITY about you that your INFERIORS, and all trolls were your inferiors, never dared speak your name aloud, preferring to call you HER IMPERIOUS CONDESCENSION or the ALLMOTHER. This latter term always struck you as especially flattering because MOTHERS, like their vestigially opposed counterparts FATHERS, are mostly a part of troll MYTHOLOGY AND ANTIQUATED VOCABULARY, and it was useful for you to command a mythological level of respect.

You have no INTERESTS, since any sign of personal affect could have proved a POTENTIAL WEAKNESS for your NUMEROUS CRITICUTIONARIES to take advantage of. You had some many solar sweeps ago, of course, when you lived as a youth on your homeworld of ALTERNIA, but ERASED them from record when you first entered into the THROES OF REBELLION against the previous empress. You even had your lusus BROKEN DOWN INTO BIOMATTER lest anyone find a way to use her as a weapon against you.

Since ascending to your role as empress, you lived on your PERSONAL FLAGSHIP with your IMPERIAL CONSORTS and a staff of retainers and militia. KUMBHA VAZIRI was a fellow indigo-blood and your most recent consort, but was rather younger than you, since your consorts had an EMBARASSING HISTORY of BETRAYAL and needed to be REPLACED every few solar sweeps. The consort was traditionally a sort of INFORMAL MOIRAIL for the empress, but you had never been weak enough actually to need one for that romantic function.

All these uses of the past tense, of course, are because EVERY TROLL BUT YOU SEEMS TO HAVE JUST DIED.

You felt it coming, of course. There were psychic ripples through the universe seconds before it struck, and when it did strike, it felt like your insides and outsides were trying to swap places. You tasted blood and your vision went black for a little while, but you are empress, and it was beneath you to be vanquished by so base and natural a phenomenon. You clung to the ladder exit of your imperial respiteblock and waited until the pain and vertigo subsided. Your right knee hurt a little from where you banged it against a rung of the ladder when the first ripple hit you, but besides that, you are fine.

You are pretty sure you know what happened. The Vast Glub finally struck, and while you are not technically of the same high caste as the Rift’s Carbuncle, Gl'bgolyb, your role as empress protected you. Still, you didn’t reach this job by not testing out your assumptions, and it’s possible that one of your many enemies just developed some sort of neural attack wave that targeted only you. You’re going to need more data, so you ascend the ladder from your respiteblock, favoring your right knee, and begin to explore your flagship.

It doesn’t look good. If there was some technological attack, it was fairly wide-reaching. Dead trolls litter the halls, their blood seeping out from orifices new and old and pooling in rainbow puddles, caste and caste mixing together frivolously. It is disgusting. You identify the bodies, mentally sorting them into their respective onboard factions to make sure that one group or another didn’t launch an attack on everyone else, but there is no caste or belief system or alliance of necessity not represented among the dead. It looks like the whole ship really is gone. You look into the weapon and control blocks but the situation is no different. You notice some control pads sputtering from the blood splashed onto them and you considerately turn them off until you can figure out what to do next.

It occurs to you to check on your imperial consort. You doubt Kumbha could have done this – he had always struck you as one of your most loyal consorts ever, despite the age gap, and he never showed any flair for programming either – but if anyone else on the ship survived, it was probably him. Your thought is confirmed as you pass into his chamber – no lock on the ship cannot be opened by you – and find Kumbha in a heap beside his desk, bleeding heavily but still miraculously alive. The attack was definitely attuned to hemospectrum, and you suspect the Vast Glub more than ever.

“EMpress?? KIminoa??” His voice is feeble as you approach him, but maintains its dragging quality.

“Don't move: Kumbha. Everyone else is dead and you're bleeding badly. What did you feel.” You speak exclusively in titles and declarations, as befits a troll of your rank.

“THis horrible wave came through my mind and body all at once.. OH god,, KIminoa,, I Hurt everywhere..”

“Yes: I know: Kumbha. I think it was the Vast Glub. Do you think you have any chance.”

“NO,, it''s too much.. SOon I''ll be dead too.. KIminoa -- EMpress -- what are you going to do??”

“I'll go back to Alternia: and see if it's been invaded. If it has: as the last representative of the troll species: I'll fight them until one or the other of us dies.” The words come easily to you, for your dedication to your subjects is total and complete.

He nods and fights to breathe. “KIminoa...... before you go,, please kill me.. I Don''t want to die so slowly..”

“I will. Goodbye: my consort.” From your strife specibus you summon your imperial spear, the Pokerface Poker. Its mirrored surface reflects impassively the dying troll before you. You hold it aloft for the killing blow.

“KIminoa,,” he says, staring at you rather than at the spear that is about to end his fading life. “KIminoa,, I''Ve always loved you..”

“That is immaterial,” you say, and drive it home. His vascular system bursts apart and his muscles go limp. You rise to your feet and walk away before you can be bothered by the look of pain in his eyes. One more troll dead. That is how it goes. That is how it has always gone. You do not have the medical knowledge to have treated him, and he was hurt and deserved to be culled. That is how it goes. You are empress. All is beneath you.

You return to the ship’s control block and turn on the fleet communications system. There is no word from any of the other ships, though many of them were stationed around your flagship when the Glub – there is really no reason to believe it was anything else – hit you. You were in place to invade a newly discovered planet some glaresweeps away from Alternia, but now the planet’s inhabitants will live to breathe another day. Perhaps someday they too shall discover space flight and will fly to Alternia and find… what? That must be your destination. Even if there is no one left alive and no attacking force to battle, you are empress and it is your duty to be on homeworld for the end times.

You do not know where Alternia is or how to get there, for you have always had a dedicated crew for such things, but you can learn. None of the ship’s functions seem to have been damaged, so you still have access to food and sopor, and you have all the time in the world to read through the manuals and learn the workings of the ship. You drag the dead bodies from the control block and take them to the incinerator, so that they will no longer be in the way. Brainless cleaner droids are dispatched to remove the colorful blood from the controls, and it is reassuring that something besides you still moves, however robotic and lifeless.

You begin the long task of learning how to bring your flagship back to Alternia. The ship’s memory banks have access to innumerable works of instruction besides the physical manuals onboard, and you refer frequently to these for clarification and definition of unfamiliar terms. There is also useful information to be had on the Alternet, but as the hundreds of hours of learning go by, more and more servers disappear from the ‘net until there are no pages left to visit and your browser is as helpless as its mythological namesake, Sisyphus. Most probably, the bees of the apiculture networks on Alternia have no one left to feed them and are slowly dying, taking their Alternet servers with them. The information in the manuals and memory banks is somewhat less up to date, but you still manage.

When you sleep, it is worse than usual. The slime of your ornate recuperacoon keeps away many of the bad dreams, but a few always get through. Every troll you have ever felt any sort of connection to in your long life features at one point or another in your dreams, falling bloodily to the ground as the Vast Glub tears through them. Somehow they know you are there, and their words to you are always the same before the breath leaves them before.

“Wy did yu fale to protect mi?”

“Why’dja failta protect me?”

“WhY DiD YoU FaiL to ProtecT me?”

“Y9u failed. To pr97ec7 me. Why?”

“Where4 did U fail 2 protect me7”

When, weeks after the Glub, it is finally Kumbha’s turn to die before you, you wake yourself up, hurling the Pokerface Poker into the dark. The motion triggers the lights to turn on, and you pull yourself from your recuperacoon, cursing loudly, and pull on a robe. There is no one left alive to see you, but you are empress, and protocol forbids you from leaving your respiteblock in the nude. You try to stay awake for as long as possible, but a troll must sleep sometime, and so you do, always fitfully. One day, wandering the ship after trying to absorb a particularly obtuse passage in one of the manuals, you discover that Kumbha’s recuperacoon was larger than yours, and you take to sleeping in it instead, since the additional slime keeps more of the dreams away. You will never know what so tormented him that he needed so much extra protection from the terrors.

After what you would guess is about the length of a season on Alternia – it is hard to keep time with no moons in the sky – you feel that you are ready to begin the trip home. In theory, you are now master of the workings of your flagship, and it is time to return to the heart of your former kingdom. Besides, a possibility has occurred to you in the interim for saving your species. It is a faint one, for you never kept tabs on it during your more active days as empress, and you dare not hope it will work, but there are days when it keeps you going as you emerge from the recuperacoon.

You flip the master switch and the control room lights up. You have not tried to use any of the controls before now, but you have done the reading and they are all familiar before you. A spacemap found on the Alternet and downloaded before its server died tells you where your destination is. Slowly, carefully, knowing the flagship is meant to be staffed by multiple trolls at once, you turn it around and begin to boost it towards home. As all goes according to plan, you let out a breath you had not realized you had been holding.

You give the ship’s engines everything you can, since you see no reason to conserve fuel. If for whatever reason another trip is required after you reach Alternia, you can always find more fuel matter on the planet and load it into the ship yourself. You will have all the time in the world.

It takes a long time to reach Alternia. You find a shipboard computer that displays universal time, and the equivalent of several solar sweeps go by before you finally sight your gray homeworld. In the meantime, you do your best to stay busy and find new duties for yourself as empress. You sort the dead bodies you had not previously incinerated by caste and deposit them in separate storage containers. You join the cleaner droids in removing the caked blood from the halls, and eventually everything is clean again. Clean and lifeless. You try to remember what life was like before you became empress, and it is difficult. Like all trolls of any nobility, you lived alone – only base bloods lived in the sweeping communal hive stems – but then you had your lusus to watch over you. She had been strict, allowing no disobedience or frivolity in the empress to be, and she had shown no surprise when you had her killed, but she had still been company.

You take up exercise, running about the flagship’s corridors and listening to the pound pound pound of your feet against the floor echo into silence, as no one but yourself hears it. Several times you redecorate the entire ship for simple lack of anything else to do. You take up reading and go through many of the works of fiction stored in the ship’s memory banks, written in a more peaceful period of your species’ history when such creativity was less looked down upon. You even find a few troll movies in the rooms of some of the dead, and try to watch them, but they are just too terrible. Besides, it feels strange to see other living beings, even though they are merely projected images.

As the equivalents of seasons go by, sleeping grows even harder. Even Kumbha’s large recuperacoon keeps out only a fraction of the painful visions, and you take to sleeping in spurts instead, every few hours, resting your body but not staying asleep long enough for most of the dreams to sneak up on you. It is an odd life, but physically viable. You wish you could sleep more so that you would have to spend less time figuring out what to do with yourself, but the visions are far worse than the boredom.

In the third sweep of travel, you suspect you are beginning to go a little mad. From toys and food containers and bits of clothing you construct a miniature throne room on the floor of the large weapon block, and then a whole palace, and finally a city. You expand it no farther, since there is only so much floorspace and you do not have the means to send your fictitious inhabitants into the sky. The city is perfectly laid out in concentric circles of hemospectrum position, radiating outward from the palace, a tiny purple fortress to house the royalty within. Over time, you invent individual inhabitants of your city and move them about their lives as threshecutioners or archaelotantes or a dozen other jobs. When one of them displeases you, it is culled. That is how it goes. That is how it has always gone.

You are proud when Alternia and its two moons finally appear on the viewscreens. Proud that you mastered the controls of your flagship and steered it home, and proud that you survived the journey. You are empress, and you are supreme, even when all others are dead. In the days of approach, you review all sections of the manuals on landing – you doubt that any automatic mechanisms to help with descent continue to function on the planet below – and then begin the landing procedure with full confidence. Technically you could get something wrong, but you have come this far, and it would be ridiculous if you made a mistake now. You have come to Alternia, and you will survey it and discover what your new duty must be.

You bring the flagship down onto a forest, the fire of its jets burning away the trees beneath you as you descend steadily to the ground. Your clothes are neat and you are in full regalia for this moment of return. You hold your spear at the ready and step from the ship to begin your exploration.

There are wild animals everywhere, their numbers increased dramatically without trolls to keep them in line. You handle yourself well in combat – an empress must be prepared to defend herself against threats both political and physical – whenever one of them sees fit to attack you, but for the most part you leave one another alone. You are not shocked until you see lusus running free among the other animals, their custodial roles apparently forgotten with no one left to care for.

Your first destination is the ocean, to try to determine what slew the Emissary to the Horrorterrors, but there are no visible clues on the sea’s surface, and you lack the specialized physiology to go underwater and witness directly the resting place of the aquatic behemoth. You try to find a submersible, but too much has stopped working without anyone to maintain it, and you are unwilling to start learning the skills involved in submersible operation and repair so soon. You intend to return later, but first you have other locations to visit.

As you leave the seaside, you remember that Gl'bgolyb had been a lusus, and had a charge, a young troll named Feferi Peixes. Feferi was the heir apparent, and had the highest blood of all. You would have had her killed long ago were it not for Gl'bgolyb’s protection. You wonder if it is possible that Feferi too might have survived the Vast Glub, and be somewhere on Alternia, equally alone. If so, she would probably be underwater somewhere, though, and even if not the chances of finding one troll on an entire planet are not especially promising. If Feferi is alive, and you find her, it will be because she wants to be found. And then what? A fight to the death between the last two trolls in the galaxy over an empty title?

You shake your head at the thought and continue walking. It is not an empty title. Your species may be dead, but you are empress, and you will discover your duty and you will carry it out. And if at last you give up hope and find nothing more to do, then you will know that you have failed your people and deserve to be culled. As your last act of service, you will do the culling yourself. You have known this since you confirmed in the control block of the flagship that you were the sole remaining survivor. But you have two more stops to make before you return to the ocean and do the final test.

It has been a long time since you last set foot on Alternia, but the shifting pink sands and garish moons are nonetheless familiar. You travel at night and invade the hives of long-dead trolls to take what solace you can from their recuperacoons during the day, since the solar cycle places new restrictions on your times of mobility that did not exist aboard the ship. Everywhere you see the same decaying corpses, surrounded in dried blood, except for the cases where the wildlife have broken in and devoured the bodies before time could work its magic on them.

You begin to cull lusus when you see them. Their niche is as caretakers, and if there are no young trolls to care for, they have no part to play in the ecology. It is a futile gesture – there will always be more lusus – but it is good to be doing something real, after seasons of nothing but moving little pretend trolls around on the floor of a derelict battle station.

You wonder what young Feferi might have been unable to protect her lusus from. Or perhaps she simply neglected to feed it, and it had died of starvation. Feferi had been assigned a moirail – you think his name was Eridan Ampora, although it is hard to remember – to help her and to make sure she continued in her duties, but perhaps something had gone wrong. Heirs were assigned moirails to prepare them for the more formal responsibility of a consort in the event that they achieved the throne. Maybe she grew tired of him, or maybe their relationship grew too flushed and she abandoned Gl'bgolyb in a fit of youthful indiscretion. There were clear risks in leaving the feeding of the most dangerous creature on Alternia to children, but no adult who had grown up unculled would have wanted to remain on the planet instead of joining the vast Starfleet, and it kept Feferi busy enough that she could not reasonably try to assassinate you without fear of everyone dying. The system had worked… but clearly it had stopped working, one way or another. Perhaps you will find out how when you return to the ocean and find a way to enter the dark waters safely.

In a small grove of trees you find an entrance to the subterranean complex where the lusus wait for new charges. After a few hours of searching you discover the chamber housing the great mother grub. You are not surprised – only disappointed – to discover that she is dead. Without any trolls to feed her, she must have died sweeps ago. Only your faint hope remains.

You had heard, although you had never thought much of it, that a wriggler with a special jade green blood had been born, and that a virgin mother grub had abandoned its role as progenitor of the species to act as her lusus. You have a vague sense that their hive had been somewhere in a certain desert, not too far from the border. Unlike the skeletal remains before you, this virgin mother grub had lived above ground, and perhaps she has managed to hunt and sustain herself. Perhaps she is still alive even now and can be brought to serve as a new mother. The trolls aboard your flagship whom you sorted by caste are well-preserved enough that you should be able to extract the requisite genetic material from them to begin the species anew if only the grub survives.

Ultimately, though, your hopes are foiled once again. It takes a long time of wandering and battling wildlife before you find the oasis where the desert hive stood. Something has happened, though, and the building itself has completely vanished. There is a large splotch of dried green blood nearby that roughly matches a mother grub in size and shape, but there is no sign of the grub herself, not even a skeleton. Suddenly you realize that her body must have contained a matriorb. Did something kill her in order to extract it? But what? Or who? And how can you possibly guess where they might have taken it before they were killed by the Glub?

As you ponder these questions, your eyes are drawn to the desert to the east. There is a strange sort of temple standing there, surrounded by six pillars in a circle formation. Spear in one hand, just in case, you approach the temple and notice a pit in the ground before it, with a set of sand-covered stairs leading down into the darkness. In search of clues, you descend the stairs.

At the base of the pit you find an enormous computer system, with twelve monitors and a single keyboard beneath them. The monitors are embedded in a large metallic plate of a shape you do not think you recognize. A glowing button – how, when all other systems you’ve seen have stopped working? – invites you and you press it.

One of the screens comes to life. It is focused on a young troll, you would guess six or seven solar sweeps old, with a bright purple highlight in his hair and striped pants and scarf. Abruptly, you recognize him from pictures as Eridan Ampora, the heir’s moirail. As you watch the screen, the boy Eridan blasts another young troll with a white light and the other troll is thrown backwards against a wall. You do not understand. Is this a record of something that happened before the Glub? But why does it focus on Eridan? And why does it begin the clip at such an abrupt moment?

As the light of the attack fades, you see the rest of the room, and everything becomes clear in an instant. In the background, lying next to a pretty young troll who looks horrified at the action before her, is the missing matriorb from the vanished virgin mother grub. The sign on the troll’s shirt is jade green. And there, turning from Eridan to the fallen body of the other troll, is Feferi Peixes. Somehow she must have found a way for not only herself but also these other three trolls – and who knows how many more not visible on the screen – to survive the Vast Glub. They have brought the matriorb with them and are going to start your species anew, with Feferi as empress instead of you. But she is not fit to be ruler. In triggering the Glub, not only did she fail to kill you, her target, but she also killed her entire species save for this select set of followers. That is not culling. Culling is done in response to imperfection and failure, not to the entire species.

As you watch the screen, you see Eridan point his weapon – a wand of some sort – at Feferi, but he seems unable to follow through with it. You will him fervently to kill her, to punish her for this act of wanton violence, for killing the entire species for the sake of a failed bid at your title, but he hesitates. Again you notice the keyboard beneath the screens. You are still not sure if this is a recording or something that is taking place as you watch, but you see no harm in trying.

“Boy,” you type, and you see him look confused. Somehow the message is going through to him. “Eridan.” He seems to look towards you through the screen.

“You kill that girl,” you type. Feferi has turned from the defeated troll’s body and is readying herself to attack Eridan, and while you have no idea what his motivations are, neither do you care. He is your hope of punishing Feferi for her crime against the species.

“You kill that girl this instant.”

And he does.

You are still empress. And your duty has been fulfilled.


End file.
